Tuesday, September 30, 2008

The new release of Metawidget furthers its philosophy of 'inspecting the existing back-end for as much information as possible' by going after actions.

So now, in addition to automatically generating and wiring up textboxes, checkboxes etc. based on the properties of your business model, it'll generate buttons based on the actions of your business model.

...and it'll generate command buttons that are localized and wired up to the correct actions...

You can see this in action in the included DVD Store Example, which retrofits an existing Seam application to generate its input fields and command buttons automatically, reducing all that boilerplate code.

Swing AppFramework

...then you can now point a Metawidget at your business model, and it'll generate command buttons that are localized and wired up to the correct actions. You can see it in action in the included Car Demo.

You can further combine all this with the other pluggable inspectors, such as JexlInspector to easily and declaratively control your app's actions...

CodeZilla: yes, there are definite similarities with Naked Objects. The three big differences are:

1. Yes, Metawidget runs on more front-end platforms

2. Metawidget runs on more back-end architectures too: this is important! Metawidget does not impose a stylized back-end architecture on your applications (eg. requiring all business logic be put on the domain objects, with no controllers, like Naked Objects does)

3. Metawidget does not try to 'own' the whole UI. It is just a widget that plays well alongside all the other widgets in your UI toolkit, allowing you the full power of your chosen framework.

When I saw "jBPM" I thought you may have meant a replacement for the insufficiently rich/pretty forms that can be generated from jBPM Tasks. While the functionality you describe is useful, it has more to do with Seam pageflows and the jPDL syntax than it does the long running business processes I think of when you say jBPM.

That said, I will still be evaluating metawidgets for the purpose of supporting task UIs.